


Melting the Ice

by JacarandaBanyan



Series: Stony Bingo fills [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Blankets, Developing Relationship, Emotions, Kidnapping, M/M, Mental Health Issues, No one knows Tony's Iron Man, Pre-Relationship, SHIELD, SHIELD is sketchy, Steve Has Issues, Stony Bingo, bingo prompt, blanket-addict Steve, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 07:40:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15190016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: SHIELD, after Years of Searching, found their patriotic darling, and were happy to answer any questions he might have. They Understood that This Might Be A Bit Disorienting. Steve thought that the arctic wind that howled like a pack of wolves would snatch any questions he had straight from his mouth and scatter them across the ice, but he prepared a list anyway.





	Melting the Ice

**Author's Note:**

> Bingo Prompt: Ransom Note

Steve wakes to fire and ice, and his first unfrozen thought is that the world is ending. It’s only later that he amends that statement. It was only his own world that was ending.

SHIELD, after Years of Searching, found their patriotic darling, and were happy to answer any questions he might have. They Understood that This Might Be A Bit Disorienting. Steve thought that the arctic wind that howled like a pack of wolves would snatch any questions he had straight from his mouth and scatter them across the ice, but he prepared a list anyway.

  1. How did the War end?
  2. Why is the sky on fire?
  3. Is anyone I love still alive?
  4. If this is the future, are there robots?
  5. Is that flying thing with the glowing-palms a robot? 



The last one, he realizes, can be simplified modified reshaped repurposed to the point where no words are necessary. So when the Men in the Dark Uniforms stop talking and look at him Expectantly, he points at the flying thing (red and gold, it’s gotten close enough to see that it’s red and gold).

The Men in the Dark Uniforms startle out of their seats and start shouting and shooting; Steve sighs and stretches the straps securing him safely to the Medical Stuff until they’re sufficiently slack, then slips out, stands up, and stares.

He wonders if it's just the robot that startled them, or if they hadn't noticed the fire and explosions either. That seems pretty improbable to him, but it's also pretty improbable that he's alive after many years frozen in his own plane wreckage without food or water, so what does he know.

His body is still cold and stiff when he moves, and the thought that there might be ice in his body, freezing him from the inside, flits through his head like a colorful, distracting butterfly before he bats it away. Now is not the time to be thinking such distressing things.

The flying robot flits through the air with far more grace than metal should possess as Men in the Dark Uniforms lob every weapon in their arsenal at it. Every once in awhile, the flying thing levels glowing palms at them like a magician facing down an army of shadows, and it becomes crystal clear who is going to win. Steve hesitates, looking for the strategy, the Way to Win that his rescuers have missed.

_ (It helps if he doesn’t look at the ice beneath his feet.) _

Men in the Dark Uniforms (it turns out they’re called Agents) are yelling desperately to one another over the howling wolfwind about someone called Iron Man, and Steve realizes they’re talking about the flying robot. The strategic corner of his brain starts working out how to get Iron Man to give up his air advantage when he’s spotted.

Iron Man jerks to a halt and stares at Steve. Smoke rises like a swaying cobra behind him, and bullets bounce off him like hail, and something explodes dully in the distance, but his eye slits don’t stray from Steve. For the first time, Iron Man speaks.

“So  _ that’s  _ what SHIELD was doing all the way out here. Color me impressed.”

The robot’s voice gives him another question to puzzle over. Why didn't anyone hear the explosions and fire in the distance before Steve pointed it out? With his enhanced hearing, Steve should have been able to hear any explosion he could see, even over the howling wolfwind.

Then arrows rain down from the sky, and Iron Man takes off into the smoldering horizon. Steve doesn’t understand how arrows could finish a fight when bullets could be ignored, but he hears Agents congratulating the archer and repeating the word EMP, so he decides to add that to his List of Questions, along with what exactly it was that Iron Man was terrorizing and why.

* * *

Iron Man returns in the dark of night. Steve lies in the bed an Agent named Agent Coulson had shown him too, straining his enhanced ears to listen for the alien whining hiding underneath the arctic wolfwind. The pitches are a perfect match, but the wolfwind is aimless and constant and mindless, while the flying robot sound has a sense of purpose. It starts low and climbs, and it sounds like intelligence.

Slowly, slowly, like a creeping vine, the ratio of uncontrollable heartbeats to each steady, measured breath grows until the sound of his pulse in his ears drowns out everything else. He continues to wait, deafened but patient. It feels like there's a wall between him and his emotions. He remembers the fire in his blood from  _ (before the ice, before Bucky fell, before HYDRA)  _ Before, but when he reaches for it now, all he feels is the ice.

While he waits for Iron Man’s entrance ( _ will it be secret, or dramatic? _ ), he reviews Agent Coulson’s List of Responses to his List of Questions after Iron Man’s earlier attack. Steve has yet to mentally file those Responses as Answers, though he's glad to have them.

  1. America won the War. SHIELD will have a presentation prepared for when we get back to New York.
  2. The sky is on fire because Iron Man is a terrorist who wields Destructive Firepower, which he uses to destroy weapons storage warehouses like the one several miles away in Northern Canada.
  3. No one you love is still alive except for Peggy, and she doesn’t remember much of anything these days, let alone individual people.
  4. There are lots of Smart People working on robots, and there are many that are capable of specific tasks, but the robots from the dime novels have not yet come.
  5. Iron Man is probably a person, not a robot.
  6. We have reason to believe Iron Man has sound canceling capabilities, which is why we often don't hear him until he's already committed his act of terror.
  7. Agent Hawkeye’s arrows are equipped with disruptive EMP technology that hinders or destroys the functionality of tech like Iron Man’s suit.
  8. Iron Man has been attacking weapons manufacturers’ stockpiles of weapons under the claim that those companies are selling weapons to Terrorists, Gangs, and other Bad Actors under the table, and that those weapons are being used to hurt innocent people.



He hopes there will be better Responses waiting for him in New York. He might have to assign an intelligence mission to himself to get Answers, however.

Agent Coulson was accompanied by two other Agents who did not speak to him. He doesn’t doubt that they are watching him, and even though they haven’t asked any of their own Questions, he thinks there might be Wrong Answers. He thinks those two silent Agents might want to know that Iron Man is coming, but he’s not sure he wants to tell them yet.

The ice in his blood cracks just a little, and on the other side he feels the smallest tendrils of grief, suspicion, hopelessness and anger. Then the ice freezes over the crack again, and he doesn't feel anything but the desire for warmth.

_ “So that’s what SHIELD was doing all the way out here. Color me impressed.” _

Iron Man is probably coming for  _ him. _  He might not be, but he probably is. So he needs to think about how to act accordingly  _ (and not about Bucky falling falling falling into the snow into the ice the water is rushing into the cockpit and it’s so cold without Bucky that he wants to d i e). _  It would be easier to find the Way to Win, he thinks, if he had Answers instead of Responses.

_ (The Agents rescued him from the ice, but he might need to be saved from the Agents.) _

Soon, Iron Man will be close enough to hear over his own heartbeat, and he still doesn’t know what to do.

_ (what to do what to do he flew into the ice in grief, and now there’s more to grieve than ever before) _

He tries to pull the covers further up, but they won’t go. He knows how to solve that problem: sit up, lean forward until you’re practically laying in a bow, pull everything out from under the mattress, then lay back down and hook everything under your own feet instead.

_ (what can he do, everyone is dead and there’s no home to return to and it feels like he can’t start again until he’s exorcised the ghosts that already haunt him but he doesn’t know how to want to let go, he doesn’t want to be empty, there are no good outcomes so what should he do) _

He doesn’t alert the Agents.

_ (he thinks he might be angry at them for saving him, but anger is too hot an emotion for how cold he feels) _

* * *

Iron Man makes a Dramatic Entrance. w  _ h I RL-BLAST! _  The wall to his temporary room explodes, and some of the wood is on fire. It falls like the fireworks Steve always enjoyed back before the ice and the cold on his and his country’s birthday. He walks,  _ clonk, clonk, clonk,  _ toward Steve’s bed, and Steve is still thinking. He can hear many pairs of feet running, like cascading millipede feet, but they can’t possibly get here before Iron Man reaches him.

He wraps his blankets more tightly around himself and waits.

“Hello, Captain. You can keep the blankets if you don’t make this difficult.”

He doesn’t care enough to run, and he’s too blind about the shape of the battlefield to fight, so he wraps himself up in a blanket burrito and goes. In his place, Iron Man leaves a neatly typed ransom note.

* * *

Iron Man’s airborne secret lair is both futuristic and  _ warm, _  so Steve immediately decides that he likes it. He’s still wrapped in blankets when Iron Man dumps him on a tall, machine-perfectly made bed, but a robot with a big metal claw-hand instead of a face brings him more blankets anyway. Perhaps the claw-hand robot made the bed? It is equally likely that there are simply other, currently unseen robots. He immediately sets about constructing a nest out of all three sets of blankets.

Iron Man continues to  _ clank, clank, clank  _ around the lair, and Steve decides to think about his kidnapping tomorrow, when he might be warm enough to care about finding a Way to Win.

* * *

In the morning, Steve feels less like there’s ice in his blood, so he gets up out of his blanket nest and goes to face Iron Man.

Iron Man is nowhere to be found, but Howard Stark's ghost is drinking coffee in the kitchen, so he decides to ask him. Howard always seemed to know what was going on, so it makes sense to assume his ghost would too. Unfortunately, the ghost is in the middle of an argument with the claw-faced robot that brought him the blankets last night, so Steve sits down in a chair to wait.

A disembodied voice joins the argument and tries to draw their attention to Steve, but the voice is too polite and measured to get a word in edgewise. The voice’s name was Jarvis, and both he and the ghost seemed to be able to understand the claw-faced robot’s mechanical noises.

The claw-faced robot must either be new or one of Iron Man’s secrets if Agent Coulson thought that robots like him didn't exist yet.

The argument rages on and on, and Steve starts to get cold again. He gets up, walks quietly back to the room he slept in, and pulls one of the blankets the claw-faced robot offered him last night out of his blanket nest. It's soft, long enough to drape over his shoulders and still trail on the ground, and has Iron Man on it, glowing palm open and pointed outwards. He wraps it around himself and walks back to the kitchen, where the ghost and the robot continue to argue.

The disembodied voice is no longer trying to interfere with the argument. Instead, it speaks directly to Steve.

“Good morning, Captain. I hope you slept well. If you'll be so good as to wait a few minutes, a cup of hot chocolate will be ready for you. Hot coffee is already prepared. Please let me know if you desire a different morning drink. Based on my observations, I assume that you are still dealing with the psychological effects of spending the past several decades in the ice, and have prepared warm food and beverages accordingly. If this observation is false, please let me know immediately.”

“Thank you, Jarvis,” he says, attempting to look everywhere at once.

“My cameras and other sensors are everywhere in this building, Captain. Any direction you choose to look is as good as any other.”

Steve nods, and slips into the kitchen for the coffee. He isn't really cold anymore, but anything warm still sounds good to him.

“The mugs are in the top left cabinet.”

“Thanks.”

The coffee is still steaming when he pours it into his chosen mug- a tapered one with Iron Man’s mask on it- and it nearly burns his throats when he swallows it. He can feel the liquid warmth of it reach his stomach and start to warm him from the inside out.

“Will Iron Man be joining us?” He asks once the coffee is half gone.

“Sir will introduce himself just as soon as he's done arguing with Dum-E. Please forgive him for neglecting his duties as a host. He is prone to getting absorbed in whatever it is he's doing, be it groundbreaking engineering projects or petty arguments.”

So Howard’s ghost is Iron Man. That's nice. He won't have to explain his presence then.

“What are they arguing about? I can only hear one side of the conversation.”

“Dum-E thinks Sir should put a flamethrower in the suit, and Sir maintains that Dum-E only wants this so he can use the fire extinguisher more often. They are both quite stubborn.”

“I see.”

It was a blessing, really, that Iron Man was otherwise occupied. It gave him time to think about What To Do Next. Now that he could no longer feel the ice in the back of his mind, waiting to freeze him once again, he needed to start making real decisions.

_ (He already knew what he was going to do- whatever it took to stay warm. Now that the ice is melting, he wonders if there wasn’t ice in his mind as well as his body, and if SHIELD had planned on exploiting that.) _

He doesn't really want to go back to SHIELD. He doesn't know anyone there, and doesn't trust any of the Agents he met back in the Arctic. He doesn't know what they want from him. Admittedly he doesn't know what Iron Man wants with him either. But where SHIELD felt cold and calculating, Iron Man has been warm and welcoming. He knows that doesn't necessarily mean much. Iron Man could just as easily be trying to use him as SHIELD so clearly was. But sitting here in the warm kitchen, wrapped up in a blanket and drinking coffee, he has no desire to return to the silent stares of the Agents as they weighed his words and decided what to do with him.

“Your hot chocolate is ready, Captain.”

“Thank you, Jarvis.”

He retrieved another mug, filled it with piping hot chocolate, plopped in a handful of marshmallows after Jarvis pointed them out for him, and began to plot out the Way to Win.

He didn't want to go back to SHIELD. In hindsight, they were probably looking to absorb him into their agency before he had time to think that he might have any choice in the matter. He thinks that if he stayed there, the cold would work its way into his heart and his bones and take root there like some hardy, invasive plant. 

He didn’t know much about Iron Man’s goals. Agent Coulson called him a Terrorist Threat, but Steve hadn’t seen much terrorizing. Agent Coulson described his attacks against weapons companies as if they were direct Attacks on America, but Steve thinks that might not be the whole truth. Unless his country had moved to a Weapons Manufacturing-Based Economy, he couldn’t see how this would affect very many Everyday Citizens. And even if it was an Attack on America, weren’t these companies also launching their own Attacks on America by selling to the country’s enemies?

_ (And Iron Man made him Warm. Already he could feel the ice dripping from his heart in painful little drops of memory and grief and he some of the old fire was building from the cold coals.) _

Laid out like that, it seems to him that the Way to Win is to stay with Iron Man, at least for a little bit longer.

_ (Stay until he felt the flames of Passion and Anger and Resolve roaring inside him again) _

He takes another sip of his hot chocolate.

* * *

It turns out that Iron Man’s name is Tony Stark, and he loves coffee. He has a cabinet filled to the brim with different coffees from different countries, each in different labels and from different distributors, each of which he can recommend to Steve for one quality or another and all of which Steve can use.

The coffee is a warm, welcome comfort in the mornings.

Tony Stark is a former weapons manufacturer who is going to clean up the weapons manufacturing world, whether his former colleagues like it or not. It seems odd to Steve that SHIELD, if they are a governmental organization like Agent Coulson claimed, would be happy that Iron Man is trying to stop weapons of terrifying power from being sold to terrorists.

“Wouldn’t they want to work with you, not against you?”

“They did, in the beginning, sort of. They didn’t really want to work  _ with _  me, they wanted me to work  _ for _  them. They wanted the suit, which I don’t trust anyone with, and they wanted me to attack any target they pointed at, regardless if it was a terrorist cell or not, and didn’t want me to ask too many questions about it. Well, I famously don’t play well with others, and they got shadier and shadier the more I looked into them, so I blew them off. I guess if they can’t control me, then they have to try and put me down.”

Steve thinks that sounded like something a shadowy government organization would do. He remembers the silent Agents that flanked Agent Coulson, and thinks that this is only what he expected.

“What does a Win look like?” he asks.

“World Peace.”

“Wow.” That’s a big, warm idea. It might burn him up to pursue it. “What’s the plan then?”

Tony sips his coffee. “First, I’m going to force the weapons companies to stop selling their weapons. While I’m working on that, I’m also working on green energy. I’ve managed to miniaturize the arc reactor enormously, but it’s still kind of expensive. Once I find a way to make it cheaper, I’ll make them inescapable. While I’m focusing on the arc reactor, I’ve got the brightest minds money can buy working on other forms. Solar panels that don’t require destructive mining to make. Water power that doesn’t suck. Wind power that people won’t reject out of hand. There’ll be so much clean energy, the Koch brothers will have a have a stroke.”

He rambles on and on like a clattering train, listing the ideas he has and how he plans to achieve them, though those plans often consist of little more than ‘Science!’ and possibly money. Still, Steve likes his goals. Less violence sounds good, and not letting enemies of not just the state but every state have American-made weapons is a no-brainer. He doesn’t really know much about clean energy, but a quick scientific history lesson from Jarvis, with commentary from Tony, convinces him that that is just as praiseworthy a goal. Education, medical tech, prosthetics- all of it sounds like something he could get behind.

* * *

“Why did you kidnap me in the first place?” Steve asks.

The two of them are sitting on a soft, coffee-stained couch, wrapped up in blankets and figuring out how they want to proceed.

He knows his List of Reasons Why He Wants To Stay With Iron Man.

    1. Tony is warm, and his lair is too
    2. Tony has goals that Steve agrees with and wants to help with
    3. Steve doesn’t want to go back to SHIELD because the more he reads and researches, the less he trusts them
    4. Steve likes Tony, and all of his little robots too
    5. __(He is angry that SHIELD rescued him)__  



What he doesn’t know is why Tony kidnapped him in the first place. He knows Tony recognized him as Captain America, but beyond that he only has conjecture.

Tony considers his question.

“Well, first and foremost I didn’t want SHIELD to have you. Your PR dance routine is its own exhibit in most war museums, so I can only imagine how useful SHIELD would find you when it came to advancing their agenda. I was also curious whether you were the actual Captain America, or a fake that they were staging the ‘rescue’ of somehow.”

He snuggles up closer to Steve, playfully pushing him up against the pillows.

“And, if I’m listing  _ every _  reason, there were a few less well-thought-out ones. I like giving SHIELD the finger, and this was the perfect way to do that. And you were really, really cute. Like, that ass is the real national treasure, and I can’t believe they didn’t have a single shirtless picture of you on display, someone should get on that pronto.”

Steve laughs and wraps an arm around Tony, pinning him to his side so his body heat can leech through the cloth into him.

“Which is why,” Tony continues, “I am going to take  _ so much pleasure _  in paying your ransom. SHIELD is still trying to figure out what I want with you and how to get you back. They’re all running around like scared deer, trying to figure out how not to get implicated in your kidnapping. Don’t worry, I won’t let them get you. Once we’re in the States and people know you’re back, you’ll be able to give press releases and speak for yourself. Unless you want everything to stay a secret? I can totally do that too.”

“Public is good,” Steve says. “That way, SHIELD can’t try and re-kidnap me at some later date.”

The icy barrier between his emotions and his mind has finally melted, but he’s still trying to sort out the emotions he finds on the other side, ranging from warm contentment to face-melting anger to sizzling grief to white-hot sadness that he can’t seem to touch without pain.

Somewhere in that tangled mess is a softer feeling, one that ignites whenever Tony’s around. He shelters that feeling, and starts nurturing it. He thinks he knows what it might be, but he’s willing to wait and give it a little time. It wouldn’t do to fall in love with one of the first people he met in the new century without at least seeing New York first. 


End file.
